Journal · Country

The years the record goes quiet

Between 1799 and the 1840s the Awabakal world around this lake was broken. The documents are thin, the numbers uncertain, and the silence itself is part of the story.

How sure are we Reasoned — Contains clearly-marked reasoning about what might have happened. Not record.

08/10/2026 · 8 min read

Aerial view of the valley, bush to the horizon

How to read this page. The documented facts are few and we state them as facts. Everything else is marked as reasoning. We have written it because leaving the silence unexplained would be its own kind of untruth.

What the documents say

In March 1799, at the mouth of the Hunter River a day’s walk north of here, a colonial pilot named Henry Hacking shot four Awabakal men. That is the first recorded killing of Awabakal people by the colony, and it happened eleven years after the First Fleet and twenty-five years before anyone built a mission on the lake.

In 1824 the colonial government reserved ten thousand acres at Reid’s Mistake, on the eastern shore of the lake, for a mission to the Aboriginal people of the district. Lancelot Threlkeld arrived the next year, built a house in 1826, moved to the western shore around 1831, and was shut down in 1841 when the governor withdrew the funding. In his final report he gave the reason in a phrase that has been quoted ever since: the Aboriginal people of the district, he wrote, were becoming extinct.

Estimates of how many Awabakal people there were before 1788 run to around fifteen hundred. By the late 1830s, by the counts of the time, the number living around Newcastle, the lake and south toward Gosford was in the low hundreds. The figures are uncertain; the direction is not.

Those are the facts the record gives us. They are not many. Here is why.

Why the record is thin here

The documented frontier violence in this region — the sites the University of Newcastle's massacre map records — lies in the Hunter Valley to the north-west, on Wonnarua and Gringai country, where the land was taken for grazing in the 1820s. Lake Macquarie's southern end was different: swampy, forested, poor for cattle, a long way from a port. The settlers did not arrive here in force until the timber-getters of the 1870s. What that means is that the catastrophe that reached the Awabakal came less by the gun than by what the gun's arrival elsewhere set in motion: disease moving ahead of the colony, the collapse of the trade and marriage networks that tied the lake people to the ranges and the coast, the loss of the fishing grounds at the lake's mouth, and the slow attrition of a people whose world had been made unworkable.

For this valley in particular — the flats where the creeks come down to the lake, the ridges of ironbark and spotted gum above them — we think it reasonable to suppose it was used, not lived in year-round: a place people came to, from the lake and from the ranges, for the reasons people come to an edge. The grinding grooves in the district are beside water, as they usually are. The sandstone platforms are on the ridges. A good season would have brought people here to make tools, to hunt in the forest, to meet. A bad one would have emptied it. After 1799, every season was bad in a new way, and at some point in the 1820s or 1830s the people who used this valley simply stopped coming, or stopped being. No one wrote it down. That is the silence.

What survived

Not nothing. The language survived, because Biraban sat with a missionary for fifteen years and the missionary wrote it down. The stories of the lake survived in the same book, and in the memories of families who did not go extinct, whatever Threlkeld thought he was watching. The grooves in the stone survived, because stone does. And the people survived: the Awabakal, Bahtabah, Biraban and Darkinjung Local Aboriginal Land Councils that ring this lake today are run by the descendants of the people the 1841 report wrote off. The mission closed. The community did not.

Why we are telling you this

Because a place offering rest on this land should also tell the land’s history. The calm here is real; it was not always here, and it was not free. Knowing that changes nothing about the morning light on the dam. It changes what you are standing in when you see it.

This page will be revised as the custodians correct it and as we learn more. The massacre map and the archives of the Local Aboriginal Land Councils are the next places we will look.

Awaba: the language of a plain surface

Sourced

What the documents say

Why the record is thin here

What survived

Why we are telling you this

Awaba: the language of a plain surface

Stories in the landscape: the lake as the Awabakal described it